No. There you go; you can stop reading and move on with your life, unless you, too have ever wondered what the point is of looking for things to be grateful for and then writing about or listing them.
I previously called out empathy and authenticity, so why not go for a positive psychology trifecta and knock off gratitude, as well, right? To be fair, both empathy and authenticity—at least as authenticity applies to human beings—can be written off as valid concepts, while the same can’t be said for gratitude. What I’m taking aim at here is not gratitude itself, but gratitude as a practice, which involves focusing time and attention on identifying things to be grateful for.
One might think that’s a better focus of time and attention than identifying things to be distressed by, but we shouldn’t be too quick to make that assumption. In my workshop Anatomy of Desire, I ask participants to create three lists: what they have that they like, what they have that they don’t like, and what they don’t have that they want. Writing a list of things we’re grateful for over and over is like being stuck on repeat at step 1 in this list-making process, a step that’s intended as a prequel to the most important step: identifying what we want.
What Is Gratitude, Anyway?
To answer that question, we must head once more into the breach: much as I discovered in researching empathy, it depends on who you ask, what’s being measured, what perspective the person talking about it is coming from, and what his or her agenda or aim is.
Gratitude is considered by some to be an emotion. I could explain why trying to create and sustain a particular emotion, whether “positive” or “negative,” is wrong-headed, but you probably already know that, and gratitude is clearly not an emotion.
There are emotions that accompany the experience of gratitude but they vary from one person to another and even from one situation to another within the same person. A drink of cold water when we’re thirsty, an unexpected gift from a friend, the warmth of home on a snowy day, or the arrival of a tow truck when our vehicle is stranded on a dark lonely road will elicit different types of gratitude and a different range of emotions.
In researching gratitude practices, I encountered several different varieties, including what I call bright-siding gratitude, undeserved gratitude (I am not worthy, but thanks, anyway), and performative gratitude. I’ll tackle that last one in this post.
We’re Doing It Wrong
A neuroscience guru who shall remain nameless claims that everyone is practicing gratitude wrong. He says new research reveals it isn’t experiencing gratitude that matters; it’s expressing it to someone else or watching it being expressed by other people. That would make gratitude an action or behavior.
This is not a new or original idea. An article from Greater Good Magazine quotes a passage from the New Testament in which Jesus healed 10 lepers but only one returned to thank him. Jesus muses as to whether or not the other nine were ungrateful (which is something it is very, very bad to be). The author of the article questions whether or not their gratitude “counted” if they didn’t express it.
The notion that gratitude is something you actively express to the person to whom you are grateful suggests the idea of making lists of things you’re grateful for, which might include a sunny day, does not represent gratitude. Gratitude, by this definition, is an expression, not an experience.
So then can we only be grateful (express gratitude) toward other people? Most of us don’t routinely express gratitude to the water that quenches our thirst or the furnace that heats our home. Yes, there are some cultures that thank nature and the environment for what is provided, but that is not the case for any of the cultures that are part of my heritage or the heritage of most people I know. And it’s beside the point. The water and the heater cannot receive our expressions of gratitude.
The Debt of Gratitude
This view of gratitude turns it into nothing more than a transactional social interaction, which excludes the water and the heater as recipients. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that obligation is one of the synonyms for gratitude. Are we motivated to express gratitude because we’re supposed to? Certainly children are repeatedly told to “say thank you.” In days of yore, writing thank you cards was a chore many children routinely put off. But is “thank you” an expression of gratitude or is it simply an acknowledgement? Is it any different from saying “hello” when you encounter a friend or answer the telephone or saying “good-by” when you leave or end your call?
The aforementioned neuroscience guru claims the expression of gratitude releases dopamine, which is apparently enough to validate this theory. But dopamine is released when we complete a task or a behavior loop. If doing so involved throwing a plate against a wall or shouting an obscenity, dopamine would be released whenever we did that, too. Dopamine motivates us to do everything we do. Dopamine literally is motivation.
The notion that performative gratitude has any inherent value is highly dubious. And I don’t recommend taking up expressing gratitude or finding instances when you can observe other people expressing gratitude, which sounds kind of creepy, in order to generate the release of the dopamine. There are far better ways to generate dopamine and less-creepy things you could be observing.
Wellbeing Enhancement
Most of the cheerleaders for gratitude practice point out how gratitude reportedly enhances our sense of wellbeing—or in some cases, our actual wellbeing. This idea is relatively unexamined, although there’s a tiny sub-genre of writing about gratitude practice that considers the potential negative impacts. The exploration of negative effects, however, is limited to effects on individuals. I believe the negative effects far outweigh the positive and that they extend beyond individuals to groups, societies, and humanity in general.
So…obviously there is more to come.
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